There is something particularly compelling about how people are taught to fight, with machines, in war. The machines mean that you have to learn how to use them, and the obvious dangers associated with using them incompetently make the "discovery method" unsatisfactory. Children may safely be allowed to explore the possibilities of what can be done with a set of coloured pencils and a pile of scrap paper, or with a box of plastic bricks or the contents of a sandpit. Allowing a trainee pilot to discover for himself the results of landing an airplane the wrong way, or a trainee soldier to discover what happens when he takes that pin thing out of a grenade while neglecting immediately after that to throw it anywhere … that's a different matter. So military education interests me a lot. Simply, it has to be done, and it has to be done well. If not: disaster.
And what is more, since what people are being trained to do is, among other things, to risk their lives, a lot of thought also goes into creating the sort of men whom other men will follow into battle. This is not merely a matter of teaching people to push the correct buttons and to follow orders accurately. There is more to the training soldiers and their commanders than "training", if you get my drift.
This posting is the first of what I now intend will be several about one particular military leader and educator, the legless World War Two fighter pilot Douglas Bader. (Bader is pronounced "Barder" by the way.)
Bader was a mega-celebrity in Britain, to all those Britons who fought – or who merely endured – World War Two. Tin legs, and a fighter ace. Imagine it. A celebrity biography was written about him after the war called Reach For The Sky, and a film of the same title was made in the nineteen fifties about Bader, starring Kenneth More.
Follow those links and you immediately get that Bader was famous, and that he was courageous. That he was. Not surprisingly, Reach For The Sky (in both its manifestations) concentrated on the personal battles of Bader - his battle to stay alive after losing his legs, then to walk without crutches despite having lost his legs, and then to get back into the Royal Air Force despite having lost his legs. Then, of course, there were his personal battles with Luftwaffe pilots, and subsequently with various German prison camp commandants.
But I suppose most people's knowledge of Bader stops, if it now even gets that far, after: no legs, wartime fighter pilot. (Some might add, "right wing politics", to the short list of Bader attributes. And that's true. He had no liking for socialist politics or policies, and from time to time in his later years he said so. He remained belligerently patriotic to the end of his days.)
What is somewhat less well known is that Bader was probably the most influential trainer of fighter commanders in the World War Two RAF. Although himself captured by the Germans in 1941, his pupil-subordinates continued to fight on after him using his methods, and increasingly, to command those fights.
I have recently acquired another biographical study of Bader, which complements Reach For The Sky nicely, in that it concentrates on his flying and fighting, and on the flying and fighting that he taught to others. It is by Michael G. Burns, and is called, significantly, Bader: The Man and His Men. It says a lot about this book that it is over three hundred pages in length, but that Bader himself gets shot down on page 188.
Here is my first excerpt from this book, which consists simply of its brief (and very much to my point) Introduction:
This book treats Douglas Bader as an officer and professional fighting man. It seeks to discern why and how he was such an outstanding air combat tactician, inspired leader and gifted teacher. The contribution made by Bader's education at RAF College Cranwell and his training as an officer and fighter pilot in the early 1930s was paramount to his wartime success. Cranwell encouraged its officers to be innovative and challenging thinkers. The system turned Bader into a total professional.Bader championed using the fighter wing instead of the squadron or flight to intercept bombers during the Battle of Britain. What is important about wings is not their marginal effect on the 1940 Battle, but what Bader did with the tactical insights he got from leading the Duxford Wing.
Bader analysed and discussed tactics for months. When he led the Tangmere Wing in 1941, he built it from small combat units not massed squadrons, honing timing to stop-watch perfection. With such a flexible force, he controlled a great volume of sky before and during combat defensively and offensively.
This book explores why so many of Bader's pilots became 'greats'. He moulded his squadrons by controlling postings, and by choosing from the squadron pool only the best to fly with him. They learnt by proximity to him. He had a sure eye for pilots who would learn - men like Cork, Donaldson, Crowley-Milling, Johnson, Dundas and Turner, who subsequently developed distinctively as leaders and significantly influenced the tactical employment of fighters and wings.
The small unit Bader developed in 1941 was the legendary 'finger-four' upon which British fighter tactics for the rest of the war were based; the flexible wing he developed in 1941 became the basis of the mid- and late-war fighter and tactical wings; and many pilots who flew with him in 1940 and 1941 became the leading fighter exponents of World War Two. These are the measures of Douglas Bader's greatness as a warrior.
I will comment no more on this than to note that the word "teacher" occurs in Burns' second sentence.
I was quite right about how being Cecile Dubois' teacher has its ups and downs, and that most of them are downs. Now the poor woman can't make a move or say a word without being all over the blogosphere. Here's how Cecile's latest starts:
After noticing my apparent boredom this morning, my English bitterly teacher said, "And sorry Cecile if I'm subtracting from your learning - because the more work - the more it totals up to my mental breakdown!" And I didn't even acknowledge that one coming. I just nodded smugly to myself, as if she just threw a bag of dog poop past me and I hadn't noticed. Since my mom's NRO piece has been posted, I have had a layer of dignity.
That's the key to all this. A "layer of dignity". Nothing like writing up your entire decision to Take No Further Action about your daughter's difficulties at school on a mega-mega-website with a zillion-per-hour readership.
Meanwhile, Miss Teacher is having whatever layers of dignity she may once have had stripped away from her.
And then, my teacher shockingly showed us all her new ring her boyfriend of three months had given her. The irony is she spends half the time gushing over a Serbian baseball player rather than her boyfriend. …
Yes, I'm starting to feel extremely sorry for this woman. I realise that she's probably her own worst enemy, but Cecile runs her a close second. What the old USSR used to call the "correlation of forces" has definitely tilted in that relationship.
There follow more Cecile recollections about other mad teachers of various kinds. But what if it was Cecile who drove them mad? Final paragraph:
In eighth grade, I had a mad science teacher the first semester who, in her other classes, would elaborate on her love life. When she left, the administration curbed our grades generously. And now I have an English teacher constantly on the verge of a mental breakdown. And this is private school.
Yes it is. And what great places these things schools are for sharpening the teeth of promising comic writers. Which reminds me that we have photographs of Cecile's beautiful smile when she was here in London just before Christmas, but we'll leave them for some other time.
More personal recollections, in a way that reinforces this theme (which I also bounced over to Transport Blog), namely why face-to-face contact makes learning things so much easier, and hence why travelling is still such a worthwhile activity, despite all this new gadgetry we now have, much of it of the sort which you might think would make travelling superfluous.
This evening I managed to entice Transport Blog supremo Patrick Crozier over to visit me, to explain about how to embed thumbnail pictures in postings. I hope very soon to be concocting a posting for Transport Blog, with lots of thumbnail pictures, which will make use of this knowledge.
Patrick had threatened to email me with the instructions for doing this, but I am extremely glad that instead he was able to call round in person.
There were about half a dozen different button pushings and data inputtings, all of which had to be got right, and only by him watching me do it and heckling me could I be sure that I was getting it all right. Any one of these half dozen things could have gone wrong if I'd done all this for real without Patrick's preparatory tutorial, and if something had gone wrong it would have taken an age to sort it all out.
So far so very helpful, but then in the pub afterwards with Patrick I learned something even more helpful, this time concerning how I could make better use of my Canon A70 digital camera. Crucial to this story is that Patrick also has a Canon A70 digital camera. And what is more he had his with him. And what is even more, I had mine with me. In the pub.
I can't remember why I got talking about my camera. I think I was boasting about some indoor photos I took and stuck up at my Culture Blog, using a tripod to keep the camera still. Ah, said Patrick, there's another thing you can do to deal with that. If you switch the nob on the top from AUTO to P, and then press FUNC, and then press the MF button (which is the lowest one of the four … you know, other buttons that are in a diamond, if you get my drift which you probably don't which is my whole point here) until you get to the bit that says "ISO Speed" and then take it up from 50 to 400, and then take your indoor photos, they'll come out far better.
I didn't have a Flash Card in my camera. If I had, I would have been able to satisfy myself of this truth immediately. As it was, I was able to make the necessary adjustments in the pub but was only able to take some photos after Patrick had gone. Which I did, and very good they looked too.
When people talk about how you ought to "get out more", they're not just talking about you getting drunk more often and propositioning more barmaids and vomitting over more strangers. They are talking about you learning more.
This sort of dialogue can happen in long distance chit chat, over the phone for example. But it is far more likely to happen in face-to-face contact, because when you are face-to-face you talk about all kinds of stuff, and signal all manner of ignorance and invite all kinds of educational comment.
And the other vital thing is that we both had the identical piece of kit. This meant that Patrick could show me then and there what I had to do. Push this, twiddle that, etc. Because here's another Key Point. I have only the dimmest idea of what all that nob-twiddling actually achieved. Had I had to understand the abstract principle being deployed here, which I would have done if I had wanted to get the same principle working on a different digital camera, I doubt if any of this would have worked.
The key point is that I didn't ask Patrick a deliberately targetted question. I was merely rambling, and he then volunteered the information. I didn't know there even was a question.
But of course, now that I have been out (and more to the point, now that Patrick has) I have an actual question to ask Now, distance learning can swing into action, because now I am aware much more precisely of my ignorance. How is it that, whereas before, when I took indoor photos in artificial light, the slightest wobble blurred the picture hopelessly, but now, with my camera's "ISO Speed" set at "400" instead of 50, I was able to take a bunch of amazingly well focussed self portraits simply by holding the camera out and pointing it back at myself, and clicking, with all manner of wobbling going on? I'm guessing that 400 means that the camera opened and shut, so to spea, much more quickly, and hence the wobbling, which was still going on, actually did far less blur damage. Yes? But if that's so, how come the picture still came out properly balanced, instead of nearly pitch black?
And here's another question which I can now ask, this time because I can be reasonably hopeful of understanding the answer. Suppose that, instead of having a thumbnail picture in this text that showed the whole photo of Patrick (only in miniature), I had wanted to have a thumbnail which merely showed Patrick's face, and then when you clicked on it you'd only then get the whole photo. How can that be contrived? I've seen it done. But how is it done?
Answers in the comments section to either of those two questions would be most welcome.
Brian's education continues.
I have a piece on an educational theme over at Samizdata, in connection with this New York Times story. It's about a somewhat tactless libertarian economist, who may nevertheless have done something to improve education in his home town.
As usual at Samizdata, the comments are now piling in, several of them saying that the economist, whom I defended, is a pillock, for trashing his own neighbours in a magazine, no matter how obscure.
But this comment particularly intrigued me, about the – presumably unintended – consequences of the "No Child Left Behind" program that President Bush has introduced.
An American ViewGiven the "no child left behind" with its requirements for validation (= testing) teachers seem to have little control over curriculum and "teaching" is geared towards passing the next test with little concern for "education." All the paperwork that's related seems to be especially difficult to keep up with in the smaller schools in states like Montana, Wyoming, etc. leaving the schools in danger of loosing monetary support from Big Brother, effectively killing them.
There seems to be some scattered trend towards the local citizenry giving up and supporting education themselves but it doesn't appear to be very widespread. The U.S. Dept. of Education seems to have suggested recently that some of these problems can be "worked out." One can only wonder what that means.
Any further comments on that? I leave it to you to decide whether to put them in the peace and quiet of here, or the monkey-fight that Samizdata comment threads often become.
When, as I regularly go, I type "education" into google, most of the stuff I get occupies a sort of parallel universe of political posturing, a world in which press releases are one thing, and what is actually happening is something utterly different and can only be vaguely guessed at. This article, about education in India, is rather different. It gives you a real feeling for what is going on out there. In case it entirely disappears soon, here it is in full. It's today's special story (whatever that means) from News Today (which describes itself as "South India's leading English evening newspaper"):
Coming out in favour grant of full autonomy to educational institutions, Governor P S Ramamohan Rao today said government intervention would affect the quality of education in the country.Speaking after inaugurating a nine-storeyed staff quarters of the Vellore Institute of Technology (VIT) here, built at a cost of Rs 8.5 crore, Rao said, 'full autonomy should be given to educational institutions which will help improve the quality of education. Even the Judiciary should not intervene in the field of education, leave alone the government', he said.
To realise the dream of President Dr A P J Abdul Kalam of India becoming a superpower, students should enrich their knowledge through various sources and not depend on classroom-teaching alone. Students (mainly those in the engineering and management streams) should be innovative and strive for self-employment rather than depend on government jobs.
'Maintaining law and order, providing healthcare, basic amenities and education are the main focus areas of the government and not providing jobs in the government. It (job) should come from one's own effort', he said.
Referring to a recent study done by a group of economists, he said it had been projected that in the next 30-35 years, India would become the third largest economy in the world after China and the US. However, this growth would be mainly due to its large population rather than in terms of per capita income.
This would not be real growth and only if the country's per capita income was raised, it could see real growth. For this to happen, students should work hard in their respective fields.
Earlier, G Viswanathan, Chancellor, VIT, said there should be no barrier in students from a particular State appearing for entrance exams of neighbouring States as was the case now, according to certain University Grants Commission (UGC) norms.
This barrier, he said, should be removed by bringing in changes appropriate changes in the existing UGC norms.
Viswanathan said governments seemed to be more keen on giving licenses to educational institutions to start colleges or universities rather than verifying if there was need for their being set up. This had led to a decline in the quality of the education as a large number of colleges and universities had cropped up. At present, there were 15,000 universities in the country. In Tamilnadu alone, there were more than 250 engineering colleges, he said.
G V Selvam, Pro-Chancellor, VIT and P Radhakrishnan, Vice-Chancellor, VIT, also spoke.
Maybe it's my Anglo-Saxon prejudice that the way to understand something is to witness an argument about it, rather than just be bludgeoned by unanimous experts. But personally, I that that the way to understand something is to witness an argument about it, rather than just be bludgeoned by unanimous experts.
I also, of course, agree with Governor P S Ramamohan Ra. I think it's great that the government of India is just dishing out "licenses" (whatever that means) regardless, rather then second guessing the people of India about whether there is a "need" for new colleges to be set up. Sounds like the free market in education out there is really motoring, and this really will turn India into a superpower.
I have a busy Monday, so that is probably all for today. Thank you News Today, for doing all the work.
Cécile Philippe of the Institut Economique Molinari, who was in London over the weekend, told me something very interesting when I spoke with her. She only told it to me in a very conversational and unsourced way, but what she said was so interesting that I pass it on nevertheless.
Apparently, she said, French schools are starting to suffer from a wave of "school phobia", on the part of pupils. Certain timid pupils are apparently becoming so frightened of stepping inside their school that they literally cannot do it, and instead they run away.
Cécile, if memory serves correctly, said that this was probably because of teachers becoming more fierce and authoritarian.
The equivalent stories here, if there are any, are of pupils inflicting a reign of terror on a school, and terrorising both the teachers and the other pupils.
Yet, thinking about it a little, these different stories sound to me to be closely related. Both have their roots in a breakdown in the traditional authority of teaches, caused, I believe, by such things as television, rock and roll, and the Internet. Teachers can't compete with all that the way they merely competed with everyday life outside of their schools in former times.
In France, teachers are responding to challenges to their authority by exercising their power ever more fiercely, and some pupils are thus becoming more frightened of their teachers than in the old days. In Britain, meanwhile, teachers don't believe in their right to be this nasty, so the same erosion of authority for them simply takes the form of … erosion of their authority. "Discipline" breaks down, etc..
All of which is hearsay and speculation. But interesting, I think. Need I add that informed comment on this posting would be even more welcome than such comment here usually is, which is to say very welcome indeed.
